Pat Robertson has said some pretty insane things in the past, but yesterday’s revelation regarding the gay community’s secret “AIDS ring” designed to “infect people like [Pat]” was too much even for his Christian producers, who edited his insanity out of online episodes of 700 Club.

In case you missed it, Robertson responded to a caller on air yesterday who asked if it was appropriate to reveal a friends’ HIV status to her congregation.

He advised her to stay away from her friend, because “in San Francisco…some in the gay community there they want to get people so if they got the stuff they’ll have a ring, you shake hands, and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger.”

Isn’t that something?

Today, Pat’s publicist released a statement saying he regrets that you misunderstood his remarks. There is still an AIDS ring, he says, but it may be outdated and you totally overreacted:

“I was asked by a viewer whether she had a right to leave her church because she had been asked to transport an elderly man who had AIDS and about whose condition she had not been informed. My advice was that the risk of contagion in those circumstances was quite low and that she should continue to attend the church and not worry about the incident.

In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood.

I regret that my remarks had been misunderstood, but this often happens because people do not listen to the context of remarks which are being said. In no wise [sic] were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.”

Okay, a ring that cuts the wearer to leak blood and cut the one shaking hands all in a specific spot, motion, time and all this simultaneously? He never mentions how it is put on or removed either. Horsefeathers, I say.